Bonnie and Clyde
Together Again
Warren Beatty's seminal sixties shoot-'em-up revisited
Clyde Barrow could be fairly described as having a short fuse. By the time he cashed in
his chips at age 24 he'd been responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of at
least fourteen men. Bonnie Parker probably never killed anyone, but it wasn't for lack of
trying, and she was one hell of an enabler. So how could an honest film about such a pair be
anything but a brief and sordid affair? And how could an exciting, mythic film about them be
anything but a lie?
Somehow, producer
Warren Beatty, director Arthur Penn, and screenwriters David Newman and
Robert Benton pulled it off, with the help of career-making performances from Beatty, Faye
Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Michael Pollard, and Estelle Parsons. Almost forty years after its
release,
Bonnie & Clyde has only solidified its position as
the Sixties movie,
the film that shattered the old "family entertainment" Hollywood once and for all and
allowed American films to grow up.
1
Starting Out in the Fifties
David Newman and Robert Benton were young men about town in fifties Manhattan, writing
for
Esquire back in the day when that magazine actually had a reason for existence.
They became fascinated, almost to obsession, by nouvelle vague films from France like
Jean-Luc Godard's
Breathless, but their absolute fave raves were François Truffaut's
Jules and Jim and
Shoot the Piano Player.
The nouvelle vague took the conventions of the American gangster and noir films and
bleached them in French existentialism.
2 The
important thing is not to care, because things just happen. If you don't care what happens,
then you can't get hurt. If you do care, well, you get a bullet in the back courtesy of that
cold-hearted cunt you were dumb enough to fall for (Jean-Luc Belmondo's fate in
Breathless) or your sweet, adoring girlfriend gets one courtesy of some fun-loving
gangsters (Charles Aznavour's fate in
Shoot the Piano Player).
3
Newman and Benton decided that they wanted to write a screenplay too, and what they came
up with was a combination of the two Truffaut films, with just a bit of a tour through
Waxahachie, Texas, Benton's hometown. Benton's father had attended Bonnie's and Clyde's
funerals,
4 and Benton remembered kids dressing
up as Bonnie and Clyde for Halloween. According to Benton, there were rumors that Clyde
recruited gang members to join him and Bonnie for threeways,
5 in the manner (somewhat) of Jules and Jim and Catherine, while
the Barrow Gang's reputation for down-home hospitality toward hostages fit well with the
funny, murderous gangsters in
Shoot the Piano Player.
The two writers worked out a 75-page treatment in marathon sessions at Benton's place,
listening to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.
6
They were able to show it to Truffaut, who was interested, and suggested a number of changes
to the script. However, Truffaut decided he was too busy to direct the film
7 and suggested that Godard might be interested. Godard
was
interested, but there were some communication problems, and that fell through too.
8
But meanwhile Truffaut had mentioned something about the screenplay to actress Leslie
Caron, who then mentioned it to boyfriend Warren Beatty, hoping that he might buy the rights
so that they could star in the film together.
Poor Leslie! How could a Frenchwoman be so naïve? She was six years older than Warren,
and the thought of her trying to get her bouche around a Texas twang is trés amusant
but also trés imposible. Sad to relate, Warren took the screenplay and ran.
Beatty took the script to director Arthur Penn, best known for his great success on
Broadway with
The Miracle Worker, which he also brought to the screen. Beatty and
Penn had worked together on a financially disastrous "art" film,
Mickey One (1964),
unfortunately not available on home video.
9 Penn
was hip to the nouvelle vague, but he had some foreign influences of his own, notably
Japanese director
Akira Kurosawa. Penn was fascinated by Kurosawa's approach to violent
action and violent death.
In his 1954 classic
Seven Samurai Kurosawa used alternating sequences of slow
motion and "real time" to drive home the impact of the killing of a thief. In the big battle
scenes between the villagers and the bandits he used fixed cameras operating with telephoto
lenses that allowed him to bring viewers inside the action. Kurosawa had other tricks up his
sleeve, like the severed limbs in
Yojimbo, the arrow-through-the-neck freeze frame
that concludes
Throne of Blood, and the "exploding artery" at the climax of
Sanjuro.
It's likely that Penn picked up something else from the Japanese director. Kurosawa
intended
Seven Samurai to be an epic, a tribute to the suffering and endurance of the
Japanese people. He deliberately used symbols of "eternal Japan," the hills and villages,
the fields of rice heavy with grain, a beautiful young woman combing her long black hair.
In a more self-conscious era, Penn could not be so direct. In any event, there isn't much
that people think of as "eternal East Texas."
10 But over and over again Penn selects quietly evocative
settings for the action, and we see the characters play out their brief, desperate lives
against the immense, silent dignity of the earth.
11
Trapped in the Sixties
By the time Warren Beatty got his hands on the script for Bonnie & Clyde, even the
Brits were making films that could be called "adult" without quotation marks. Films like
Tom Jones (1963) and Darling (1966) depicted perfectly normal people going
about their lives and fornicating without either suffering agonies of guilt or being run
over by a steamroller. But Hollywood still struggled in an agony of indecision, abandoning
the outright "family fare" that had characterized the famous films of the thirties, forties,
and fifties but still clinging fanatically to the fig leaf of middle-class morality.
Beatty had gotten his launch into stardom in one of the bastard pseudo-shockers of the
era,
Splendor in the Grass (1961), which warned against the dangers of sexual
repression without actually endorsing sexual gratification. Penn had just finished directing
The Chase (1966), a bloated Southern Gothic about lecherous, racist Texans, while
Faye Dunaway broke into pictures in a third,
Hurry Sundown (1967), best known to bad
movie buffs as the one where
Jane Fonda blows Michael Caine's saxophone.
Ostensibly "realistic," these films carried with them all the conventions of fifties
Broadway. They were talky and theatrical. The action led up to big speeches by the lead
characters, speeches directed at the audience rather than the other characters.
12 Hollywood production values — perfect
lighting, perfect makeup, and perfectly composed shots — made every scene look like it
was happening on stage, even if it had been shot in the Gobi Desert.
13
Bonnie & Clyde changed all of that. Somehow, Penn and Beatty decided they would
use Benton and Newman's script to break every rule in the Hollywood book. Benton and Newman
had already stripped out the artsy, poetic dialogue of Broadway.
14 They discarded all the backstory and motivation that
playwrights and screenwriters were so proud of. There are no revelations or explanations in
Bonnie & Clyde. We don't need to know why the characters do the things they do
because we see them as the people they are. Bonnie and Clyde would have the unmistakable
panache of Hollywood stars — Warren Beatty made sure of that — but they would also
be presented unapologetically as criminals. There is no attempt to explain or excuse their
behavior, and they never express regret for their crimes.
Beatty and Penn shot virtually all of the film on location, giving the bit parts to
locals, who looked like real people instead of character actors who had been hanging around
Hollywood for the past forty years.
15 The
camera work is sometimes a bit arty and contrived, as in the enormous close-ups in the
opening scenes, and sometimes "unfinished," as in Clyde's fight scene with the Texas Ranger,
when the actors frequently fly out of the frame, as though the camera were not ready for the
action.
The Things That Turn Up in the Streets These Days
The film begins with deliberate ambiguity — a series of sepia-tinted photographs of
rural life that appear and disappear with a click, giving way to an all-black screen. The
pictures go by so quickly that they seem random.
16 Interspersed with the pictures are the names of the leads and
then the title, appearing in white letters that fade to blood red.
17 This probably isn't going to be a happy picture.
An old record starts playing indistinctly in the background, slowly increasing in volume
to the point that we can make out the lyrics, but you really had to be an old-timer to
identify the singer and the song — Rudy Vallee doing "Deep Night." Eventually, we get a
little written data as well, police blotter information on first Bonnie and then Clyde. The
photos are so "authentic" that we can't tell, the first time around, at least, if we're
seeing the real Bonnie and Clyde or the Hollywood version.
After such austerity we cut to a huge close-up of blood-red lips, as Miss Bonnie Parker
prepares to greet the day in the privacy of her boudoir. Her nude lounging was probably
inspired by
Brigitte Bardot's tanning session in
... And God Created Woman. Definitely,
a great way to start a picture, and it's dramatically justified as well, totally, because
when Bonnie engages Clyde in a conversation au naturel, we learn something important about
her. She's just a bit of a tease. The abrupt cutting here, which makes us think that little
bits and pieces have been left out, and which we'll see again, particularly in the
"frustration" scene when Bonnie is unsuccessfully trying to arouse Clyde, comes directly
from Godard's
Breathless.
Bonnie's so intrigued by Clyde's larcenous intentions regarding her mother's automobile
that she rushes downstairs sans bra and even sans drawers.
18 Her galumphing descent, knees and feet wildly splayed,
suggests a certain lack of refinement.
Mrs. Parker's little Ford is one of many, many antique cars that we'll see in this
picture, almost all of them, remarkably enough, in mint condition, with sparkling chrome.
19 This is one of the subtle ways
Bonnie &
Clyde improves upon reality. It's a lot more fun, after all, to steal a pretty car than
an ugly one.
20
The wonderful conversation that Bonnie and Clyde have as they wander down the main street
of what looks to be a near ghost town establishes their characters for us once and for
all.
21 Banal but bursting with life, they
have a crude animal vitality that will not be denied. Clyde's so far down on the
evolutionary totem pole that he thinks to charm a lady by showing her his mutilated foot, as
though he were an exhibit in a sideshow. Bonnie, for her part, just can't resist a man with
a loaded gun.
Sporting a natty double-breasted blazer in subdued chocolate and a smooth-looking white
Borsalino, Clyde looks just a little well-dressed for a man fresh out of state prison. Even
Bonnie's simple dress "was cut on a bias, and it swung," as Dunaway puts it in her
autobiography.
22 Authenticity does have its
limits. Beatty was determined to make an art film with stars, an art film that would sell
tickets.
Clyde has just enough money in his slacks to buy Bonnie a "Coca-Cola" even though,
strangely, the bottles they're drinking from are not Coke bottles.
23 The camera work here is deliberately unconventional —
for example, the shot of Bonnie framed by Clyde's arm as he takes a manly swig of Coke.
24 There is also a superabundance of phallic
symbols, including the bottles themselves, Clyde's trembling matchstick, and of course his
gun, which so captures Bonnie's attention.
25
Once you take out your gun, of course, you've got to use it. The film carefully distances
us from the action, the first step in the long buildup designed to catch us off guard when
Clyde shoots the foolhardy bank clerk in the face following their first successful bank
robbery.
26 As they make their getaway,
Bonnie's so excited she can't contain herself. It's doubtful that any American film had ever
shown its heroine in such a state of unrestrained sexual arousal. All the good taste, hints,
double entendres, and other evasions of the past were simply discarded without a second
look.
Clyde, of course, isn't interested. Impotence was a "daring" topic in the sixties, at
least for films. Hemingway had made it famous, not to say a cliché, in
The Sun Also
Rises.
27 Whether or not anyone could
accept Warren Beatty as impotent, it's a great plot device. Even though Bonnie and Clyde are
together, they're not together. Their relationship is still unresolved. Bonnie's brooding
discontent, which initiated the film, remains intact. Poor girl! Who wouldn't want to
comfort her, to bring a smile to that beautiful face?
But if Clyde can't walk the walk, he can sure talk the talk. In the first of his three
remarkable speeches, he tells Bonnie that she's like him, she's "different."
28 (Yes, I know I said the "old Hollywood" films
were full of bad speeches. Well, this is a good speech.)
Clyde's rap has a palpable subtext. Bonnie's going to be a star, and he's going to be her
manager. Clyde's next speech, delivered in a diner, continues the idea. We sense Bonnie
sensing that Clyde is different. Because he's impotent, he'll live through her,
instead of possessing her. She's been laid, after all. She's done that. What she hasn't done
is be famous. And from the way she looks at Clyde, we know she's thinking that maybe he can
teach her how it's done. To celebrate their partnership, they steal a convertible. Hey, this
crime stuff is fun!
We cut to Bonnie waking up in an abandoned farmhouse, and then we segue into a little
gunplay, both characters almost beside themselves with the sheer joy of shootin'. As they
shoot, an old farmer comes around the side of the house, giving them another look at the
life they won't be living.
The shots of the departing family are taken directly from the famous Walker Evans
photographs included in
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with text by James Agee. Arthur
Penn tells us that the scene is intended to show the failures of capitalism.
29 but Bonnie and Clyde aren't going in for bank
robbing because they can't be farmers. They're doing it because they want to pull themselves
free of the restrictions and compromises of ordinary life. They don't want to be like other
people. They want to be the people other people wish they could be like.
The two get all slicked up for their first robbery, Clyde in a tight pinstripe and cap
and Bonnie in a chic sweater, scarf, and beret combo that looks just a bit closer to
Bergdorf Goodmans than West Dallas. This is, very obviously, their "first time." Clyde,
close to terrified, tries to appear cool and confident, while Bonnie is desperately anxious
not to embarrass her man.
30 We also see that
while Clyde is Bonnie's "manager," she is Clyde's audience. Her elegant laughter, when the
bank turns out to be as busted as they are, is far too "witty," too upper-middle-class for
Bonnie, and seems to be inspired by the famous "Garbo laughs" sequence in
Ninotchka.
After that fiasco, problems with their newly stolen four-cylinder Ford coupe prompt a
stop at a filling station, where they encounter the ineffable C. W. Moss (Michael J.
Pollard), the first hippie ever to appear on the big screen.
31 Sizing him up as another misfit, they adopt him more or less
as they would a puppy, someone to keep them company. We then jump ahead to a seriously
unromantic ménage a trois — Bonnie, restless and wide awake; Clyde feigning sleep; and
little C. W., sleeping like a baby.
32
The money that C. W. takes from the filling station sure comes in handy, because Bonnie
and Clyde splurge on another set of glad rags for their second attempt at a bank job,
which almost goes awry when C. W. insists on showing off his gift for parallel parking.
(This always struck me as far-fetched.) Their delayed departure leads to the inevitable: the
shooting death of an innocent man.
Bonnie at least doesn't think it's her problem. While Clyde bitches and C. W. weeps for
shame, she just wants to watch
Gold Diggers of 1933 (anachronistically, because we've
been told that Bonnie and Clyde got together in 1931
33). The next day Clyde tells Bonnie that he wants her to leave.
Now that he's wanted for murder, "things are going to get rough. You could have a rich man
if you tried." The camera lets us see what we already knew, that he doesn't want her to
leave. Her loyalty is so emphatic ("I don't want no rich man!") that Clyde attempts to make
love to her, but his efforts, despite Bonnie's best efforts, end in an embarrassing failure.
It's a touching scene, but Beatty, wearing a snow-white wife beater to set off his muscular
shoulders, looks a bit too Hollywood.
34
To further thwart Bonnie's desire for quality time with Clyde, Buck and Blanche Barrow
show up for a visit. Blanche is set up as Bonnie's opposite and the source of endless
tension.
35 The five head up to Joplin,
Missouri for a little peace and quiet,, which of course is not what they get. While Bonnie
is trying to raise the group's cultural level with a little poetry, the law shows up.
36 Clyde, Buck, and C. W. each kill a man, and
the fat is on the fire. The gang has been fairly blooded, and there is no turning back.
The flight from Joplin turns into a shouting match between Bonnie and Blanche, as moll
and preacher's daughter collide.
37 When Clyde
tells Bonnie to cool it she demands a private discussion. They stop and argue in a golden
wheat field, alternately calling each other ignorant hillbillies until a frustrated Bonnie
makes it too personal: "The only special thing about you, Clyde Barrow, is your peculiar
ideas about love-making, which is no love-making at all." Terrified at having gone too far,
she quickly reconciles with him.
The next day, they steal a paper and read delightedly (except for Blanche) about their
bloody deeds. Then they stop by a lake, apparently so Clyde can take a piss, when they are
interrupted by Frank Hamer, the fierce old Texas Ranger who will prove to be their
nemesis.
38 A photo session with Frank goes
awry when he spits in Bonnie's face. Clyde, hysterical with rage, almost drowns him, but
Buck "helps" Clyde to load Hamer into a row boat, setting him adrift. As Clyde's shouts fade
in the distance, Penn shows us the boat floating off into an idyllic woodland scene.
To demonstrate their loss of amateur status, we next see the gang pull a stylish bank
job, everyone in fancy duds and knowing just what to do.
39 Clyde, in a beau geste, allows a humble farmer to keep his
cash, an incident based on fact.
40 The chase
scene that follows is intercut with brief vignettes showing the bank officials glorying in
the publicity the robbery has created. The guard who lost his hat tells a reporter "There I
was, staring into the face of death" and he and the bank president are photographed while
pointing proudly to the bullet hole left by Clyde's gun.
The tension between Bonnie and Blanche continues to escalate when Blanche demands an
equal share of the loot. When Clyde reminds her for the umpteenth time that Blanche is
family, she demands to see her family, her momma.
41 Before they do so, however, they need a new car, and they end
up joyriding with the owners, Eugene (Gene Wilder) and Velma (Evans Evans). The gang gets to
do its jes' folks routine in a bit that proved to be Wilder's route to the big time, but
Bonnie throws a fit when it turns out that Eugene is an undertaker. That's more of the
future than she wants to see.
42
The next day, Bonnie's mood hasn't improved. She disappears into a cornfield and Clyde
races after her. The camera backs away so that their figures almost disappear in the broad
field, while the dark shadow of a cloud slides over them.
43 When he catches up with her they have another touching
reconciliation (we hear "movie music" for the first time in the picture) and Clyde agrees to
take her to see her family.
The family reunion, red filtered and shot in slow motion, is a bit too artsy, a bit too
Walker Evans. However, the dialogue is quite interesting. Clyde's clumsy lies and awkward
truths ("At this point, we ain't headed toward. We're running from.") suggest to us that
time is running out, and Bonnie's mother lets them know it. ("You'd best keep running, Clyde
Barrow.")
The gang holes up in some tourist cabins, with nothing more to amuse them than C. W.'s
new tattoo. We get some more laughs at Blanche's expense — she's a bad girl now,
wearing tight slacks and smoking, but still enough of a sissy to shriek when she touches C.
W.'s chest. Bonnie gets a bit high-hat, telling the others that if they want to play with C.
W.'s chest they should go in the next cabin, even though we're told that she assisted in the
tattoo's design.
44 When Blanche and C. W.
take off to get some chicken dinners, Clyde and Bonnie have another "comforting" scene. A
few hours later, the law shows up for a second, bloodier shoot-out. Buck is wounded in the
face and Blanche is blinded by flying glass.
Their world collapsing, the gang escapes in a car filled with screams and blood, finding
refuge in the woods. The camera retreats to show the headlights shining in the darkness
around them. The morning gives no relief, because the law has caught up with them. Buck is
killed, Blanche is captured, and both Bonnie and Clyde are wounded. Only C. W., faithful and
reliable as ever, is unhurt, and it is he that saves the day, taking them to hide out at his
father's place.
This last decision proves unwise. Ivan Moss (Dub Taylor) is the opposite of Bonnie and
Clyde, a hideous, unkillable old man, his life a ceaseless round of toil. In a conspiracy of
the old against the young, he links up with Frank Hamer and they agree to set a trap for the
two outlaws.
During her convalescence, Bonnie writes a new poem, called "The Story of Bonnie and
Clyde" in the film, although Bonnie's original title was apparently "The End of the Road."
Clyde is moved. "You told my story." He was going to make her a star, and now she's made him
one. He's fulfilled. Like a salmon who's reached the headwaters, he's ready to spawn at
last.
The film treats the lovers' coupling with high romantic seriousness, but recovers nicely
as Clyde congratulates himself on his "perfect" performance. We get another little twist of
the knife when Bonnie asks Clyde what he would do if they had it all to do over again. His
plan, that they would live in one state and commit their crimes in another, obviously
doesn't live up to her expectations. Dunaway's half smile is hard to read, but we don't have
to strain for deeper meanings. We know Bonnie would never leave Clyde.
The next day we see them in town. Bonnie has abandoned her stylish outfits and wears a
simple country dress reminiscent of the one she wore when she first met Clyde. In a very
inside bit, Clyde pops a lens from his dark glasses, emulating Jean-Paul Belmondo in
Godard's
Breathless.
45 Clyde spots a
sheriff's car and quickly gathers Bonnie in, leading us to hope they've eluded the trap that
we know has been set for them.
Instead, they're headed for perhaps the most imitated 54 seconds of film, the elaborately
designed "ballet of death" that concludes
Bonnie & Clyde. Despite all that's been
written about the film, there's surprisingly little detail about the planning of the
sequence. Penn has discussed his fascination with Kurosawa's approach to film violence and,
inspired by the actual facts of the death of Bonnie and Clyde,
46 set out to outdo the master, using all the technology that
Hollywood had placed at his disposal.
The torrent of death that descends on the pair ends the film with a finality that has
seldom been matched. But despite the brutality, we aren't made to feel that Bonnie and
Clyde's fate was unfair. They chose to live without regard for consequences, and such a
decision has consequences. Like Shakespeare's Richard III and Mozart's Don Giovanni, they're
gorgeous monsters. We revel in their crimes and in their punishments. Having lived life
without limits, they'll suffer death the same way. Bonnie & Clyde lacks Shakespeare's
poetry and Mozart's music, but it does possess the visceral appeal to the senses and the
imagination that is the unique property of film.
Aftermath
The immense success of Bonnie & Clyde brought the principals all the fame they
could have imagined. Given the perversities of human nature, and of Hollywood, it's not
surprising that none of them ever really equaled this first great achievement. Penn's
subsequent films were dismayingly pedestrian. Beatty, who could do anything he wanted, was
never quite equal to his enormous freedom. Dunaway's ability to select good roles seemed to
desert her entirely after the seventies. Hackman has fashioned one of the strongest careers
in "modern" Hollywood, but he'll always be remembered as Buck Barrow.
Benton and Newman attempted to duplicate the "tragic farce" formula in There Was a
Crooked Man (1970) and Bad Company (1972) with little success. They worked as a
team into the mid-seventies, collaborating, bizarrely, on a musical version of
Superman for the stage. Newman, who died recently, worked on all three
Superman movies, apparently making enough money to slide into retirement. Benton, on
the other hand, turned successfully to directing, scoring huge successes with "sensitive"
films like the antifeminist Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and the famous weepie Places
in the Heart (1984). Estelle Parsons won an Oscar for her performance as Blanche Barrow
and is still working in her mid-seventies. According to Leonard Maltin, she's "best suited
to playing shrill neurotics and wild-eyed fanatics." The "homuncular, elfin, inexplicably
popular" Michael J. Pollard is also still working, "playing virtually the same offbeat,
imbecilic character" in every film (Maltin again).
If You're Still in Need of Something to Read
Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde, edited by Lester D. Friedman, brings together
a number of interesting essays on the film, including articles by both Penn and Newman.
Friedman also wrote
Bonnie and Clyde, a short book (80 pages) on the film. His
excellent essay on the development of the script is available online
here. Benton and Newman's
script (the final version, which served as the basis for the film) is online
here.
The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde, by John Treherne, is a skeptical but
straight-forward rendition of the lives of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Bonnie and
Clyde: A Twenty-First Century Update, by James R. Knight and Jonathan Davis, the most
recent book on the pair, describes their lives in great detail and has lots of excellent
photographs.
Faye Dunaway's autobiography, Looking for Gatsby, has lots of good information on
the making of Bonnie & Clyde and gives a reasonably clear-eyed look at what it's like
to devote your life to the camera lens. Two biographies of Warren Beatty, The Sexiest Man
Alive,by Ellis Amburn, and Warren Beatty: The Last Great Lover of Hollywood, by
John Parker, are gossipy but worthwhile.
The
Bonnie & Clyde website has a very
nice design, echoing the opening of the film, and also has the complete text of both
The
Story of Bonnie and Clyde and
The Story of Suicide Sal.
The film itself is available on a no-frills DVD without a word of commentary from anyone.
Notes
1. You liked The Graduate? That film was so tasteful,
so "New York." I hated it back in 1968 but had to sit through it three times because my
sergeant had a crush on Katherine Ross. As for Easy Rider, if I had been as stoned
watching it as Dennis Hopper was when he directed it, I guess it would have been cool. The
only competition for Bonnie & Clyde is Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove,
which came absolutely out of nowhere in 1965. But Strangelove was satire, which
somehow made it less threatening. Strangelove spawned a number of "shocking" black
comedies, including Lord Love a Duck and The Loved One, which were both awful.
2. The "dedication" of Breathless to Monogram
Pictures, the source of many cheap gangster films, is a classic in-joke.
3. The randomness, the absurdity, and the violence, of
Albert Camus's The Stranger hovers over all these films. But what's really absurd is
that millions of insanely overprivileged, overfed American teenagers have been forced to
read this book, or at least the Cliff Notes. Somewhere, Albert Camus must be smiling.
4. Bonnie's mother refused to allow them to be buried
together. Among other things, Bonnie had gotten married before she ever met Clyde. Hubbie
had been out of the picture for some time, in state prison, but Bonnie had never gotten
around to divorcing him.
5. Clyde was apparently introduced to homosexuality in
prison, but he didn't seem to like it much, because he murdered the man who raped him. I've
read various takes on Clyde's bedroom proclivities — that he was impotent and liked to
watch other men have sex with Bonnie, or that he forced other gang members to submit to him
sexually as a way of establishing dominance. However, neither of the two books I've read on
Parker and Barrow even bother to discuss the possibility that the pair's relationship might
have departed from the straight and narrow. It's particularly odd in the case of John
Treherne's The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde, because Treherne is quite
impatient with the "myth" of Bonnie and Clyde and might be expected to favor, or at least
mention, anything derogatory.
6. "We had to make movies as one has to breathe," they
later wrote, which is how you talk if you live in New York. Aren't you glad you don't?
7. At least, that was his excuse.
8. According to the story, Godard wanted to start
shooting on location in Texas right away. When informed that the weather wouldn't permit it,
he supposedly complained that "I speak of cinema and you speak of meteorology."
9. The film, about a comedian, is almost surely based on
the life of Lenny Bruce, the last word in fifties "edge." It marks the only screen
appearance of 1963 Playmate of the Year Donna Michelle (as "the girl"). I wonder how she got
the part?
10. I was at a writers' conference in Montana once,
having lunch on a lake with a young woman. A snake appeared, rustling through the leaves,
and I thought it might be helpful to explain to her how to recognize poisonous snakes.
"Alan," she said, "I'm from East Texas. You don't have to tell me about snakes."
11. The scenes are invariably shot in the golden light
of either early morning or late afternoon. According to one photographer, "You always shoot
in the afternoon. In the morning, the light's always getting worse. In the afternoon, it's
always getting better."
12. In an echt Broadway play, the "big speech" would
make reference to the play's title — "like a streetcar named Desire"; "like a raisin
in the sun." "The splendor in the grass," a line from Wordsworth, is quoted three times in
Splendor in the Grass.
13. In The Chase, a young Robert Redford plays
"Bubber" (yes, Bubber), an escaped convict in a heroically unbuttoned shirt who's been
tramping through swamps for days to reach his beloved, Jane Fonda. "I know I look like
hell," he tells her, when in fact he looks like a young god, or even a young Robert Redford.
14. They (wisely) saved their effusions for their
parenthetical comments in the script, which ramble on and on about how the characters should
be looking and feeling and include numerous references to various art films.
15. The Chase included such familiar faces as
Grady Sutton, who first appeared in pictures in The Freshman back in 1925, and Bruce
Cabot, best known for saving Fay Wray in King Kong (1931).
16. Actually there is a pattern of sorts, although you
have to watch the film about ten times to see it. The first series, preceding Warren
Beatty's name, shows a boy growing up (more or less), while the series preceding Dunaway's
name shows a girl doing the same. A series of group photos precedes the names of the other
principals, while the two pictures appearing before the title show a girl and a boy (Bonnie
and Clyde, duh). The pictures of Bonnie and Clyde at the end of the series are,
unsurprisingly, of Dunaway and Beatty. And since Beatty's the producer, his picture is in
much better focus. It doesn't appear that any of the photos are of the real Bonnie and
Clyde.
17. The all-black screen was a mainstay of the brief
"American New Wave" era, which ran from the release of Bonnie & Clyde (1967) to the
release of Star Wars (1976). Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) begins in a very
similar fashion.
18. Father Sullivan, the Catholic priest representing
the Legion of Decency on the review board that ultimately approved Bonnie & Clyde,
claims to have seen pubic hair at this point. Nice eye, padre!
19. Many of them also have two-tone paint jobs,
all-leather interiors, chromed spare tire holders, etc. Beatty's first film, Splendor in
the Grass (1961), directed by Elia Kazan, was full of old-time cars (the film was set in
the twenties) and old-time music as well (but Kansas City jazz rather than Appalachian
blue-grass). In Breathless, the hero (Jean-Paul Belmondo) has a great knack for
finding, and stealing, expensive American cars, including a Cadillac Eldorado and a
Thunderbird. Take that, Yankee pigs!
20. The cars were also souped up to make them perform
in a way that contemporary audiences would find exciting. Most of the cars in east Texas in
the Great Depression were likely to be second-hand Model T Fords, with a top speed of about
thirty-five. However, Clyde Barrow's favorite car, the Ford V-8, which would not become
available until 1932, could do about ninety. In 1934 Ford received a letter, ostensibly from
Clyde, praising the V-8. When Bonnie & Clyde became a hit, Ford ran ads reproducing
the letter.
21. Just for the record, in real life when Bonnie met
Clyde, Clyde was making hot chocolate in the kitchen of one of Bonnie's friends.
22. Talk about chick talk! Theadora Van Runkle did the
clothes for Bonnie & Clyde, quite possibly the most famous wardrobe in film.
According to Van Runkle, the six-foot-four (in theory) Beatty was so worried about being
upstaged by the five-foot-seven Dunaway that he told Van Runkle to keep Dunaway in flats for
the entire picture.
23. The classic "hobble skirt" Coke bottle, which isn't
seen so much any more, was introduced in 1923. Perhaps the Coke people didn't think that
Bonnie & Clyde was an appropriate vehicle for their product.
24. Clyde looks like he's trying to drink the whole
bottle, but when he brings it down from his lips we see that he's scarcely swallowed any.
Beatty enjoyed shooting each scene thirty to forty times and no doubt didn't want to get
filled up.
25. Discussion of phallic symbols was de rigeur in any
serious film criticism in the fifties and sixties, particularly with regard to Ingmar
Bergman's films. Actual phalluses had yet to make an appearance.
26. This famous shot is, famously, borrowed from
Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook the World.
27. Both Penn and Beatty were (naturally) adamant about
discarding any suggestion of homosexuality or bisexuality. Apparently, it was Penn who
pumped for impotence. In The Seven Samurai, Katsushiro (Ko Kimura), the apprentice
samurai, can't get it up the first time around.
28. The funny, period hand gesture that Clyde gives
Bonnie when he says "The first time I saw you" is one of the best things in the picture.
29. Penn, and I suspect Beatty, compound the sin by
having Clyde shake hands with Davis, the black field hand. Clyde Barrow would never have
shaken hands with a black man.
30. When Bonnie asks him "What are you waiting for?"
it's not out of impatience. She thinks she must be missing something.
31. In The Chase, a no doubt deeply embarrassed
Paul Williams appears as a "wild" teenager, although he looks more like a thirty-year-old
midget.
32. A snoring baby.
33. Other missteps include campaign posters for FDR,
which wouldn't have started appearing anywhere until the late summer of 1932. The posters
probably wouldn't have appeared in Texas at all, because in those days the Democratic
candidate always carried southern states like Texas.
34. And where'd he get that tan? State prison?
35. The real Blanche Barrow was very much alive when
Bonnie & Clyde was made and sued Warner Bros. for their representation of her. She
definitely had grounds for complaint. In real life, Blanche was the same age as Bonnie and,
judging from her mug shots, better looking. (Bonnie had a pretty big nose.) She was not a
preacher's daughter and married Buck knowing that he was an escaped prisoner and twice
divorced. Presumably, she was not looking for stability.
36. The doggerel that Dunaway reads — "Sal was a
gal of rare beauty" — is from Bonnie's "other" poem, "The Story of Suicide Sal." In
elementary school Bonnie won a medal as the spelling champion of Cement City, Texas. (An
English major with attitude! How cool is that!) As an adult she was very fond of "true
detective" magazines. Her two extant poems are littered with kitschy coinages such as "scion
of gangland" and "gangdom," drawn from these publications.
37. Bonnie, like so many memorable movie heroines, is a
definite tomboy. When the gang moves into their rented home in Joplin, Blanche is delighted
by the kitchen. Bonnie never sets foot in it. The real Bonnie Parker naturally did not do a
lot of cooking but was making red beans and cornbread when the shooting started in Joplin.
Blanche's hysterical reaction to the shooting in the film is entirely fictitious. In fact,
she waited until the shooting stopped and then went out and called her dog Snowball,
ignoring the dead and wounded cops in the yard.
38. Although Hamer did organize the ambush that killed
Bonnie and Clyde, he never met them. He was hired to head up a "get Clyde Barrow" task force
after Clyde and an accomplice murdered two unsuspecting police officers in Grapevine, Texas.
Hamer, also still alive in 1967, also sued Warner Bros., settling out of court. Clyde's
little speech about the poor folk protecting them from the laws is made up out of whole
cloth, probably by Penn.
39. When Clyde shoots a bank guard's hat off, it is
once again a bit too Hollywood. One also might wonder (again) where the gang got the money
for the new clothes and where in particular the rowdy Buck Barrow picked up a taste for
stylish tweeds. (State prison?)
40. Clyde could be magnanimous. He sometimes gave
hostages $5 or $10 to cover their expenses. But he also frequently threatened to kill them,
and it appears that on one occasion he did so. (Clyde denied the murder but was identified
on the basis of a photograph.)
41. Both Bonnie and Clyde were devoted to their
families and visited them frequently. This contributed to their downfall, because they would
never quit Texas for good. After their deaths, the State of Texas successfully tried many of
their relatives for harboring a fugitive, sentencing them to short terms.
42. Bonnie and Clyde did pick up an undertaker once,
but the real Bonnie proved to be more philosophical. "You'll probably enjoy embalming us,"
she told him. "Promise me you will."
43. At the time, this was a happy accident. Today,
computer technology probably allows directors to generate portentous shadows at will.
44. Perhaps this bit was left over from the first
draft, when C. W.'s character was supposed to be involved with Bonnie. Apparently, the
tattoo had to be left in to provide motivation for C. W.'s father to inform on the gang.
45. And why is that cool? Um, because it's so
existential. They didn't plan it. It just happened!
46. The sequence is quite reasonably close to the
facts, except that Clyde was simply driving along at a slow rate of speed when the shooting
started. He was killed by the first shot and Bonnie a few seconds later. About 80 rounds
were fired. Thousands viewed their blood-stained corpses at separate funeral homes. After
Clyde's death, members of the Barrow family went on a "Crime Does Not Pay" tour, talking
about Clyde and Buck.
